The Harry Potter Experiment
by Gunsmith3000
Summary: When all things end, they begin once again. In another universe where the curse that had taken his parents hit Harry Potter, it opened the floodgates to a merging past of who he might have had always been, and shall always be.
1. Chapter 1

the Harry Potter experiment: Revelations 6v8

Fan Fiction By: Gunsmith Blacksands

Started: 1-16-09

Finished: ????

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Disclaimers: I do not own HP, Highlander: The Series.

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Summary: When all things end, they begin once again. In another universe where the curse that had just took his parents hit Harry, it opened the floodgates to a past of who he might have had always been, and shall always be.

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Somewhere in the far future, dimension number X194569802…

The man laughed, the sound of his voice echoed across what had once been Glenfinnan. It had been too long, he thought, too long since he had last set foot on the very world that he had lived in eons ago. The dead world barely even resembled the world he knew long ago. Half of it lay under a great mass of ice, while the other, dryer than that of the former Saharan sands by a magnitude of fifty.

There was no one left to remember the world as it had once been, except him.

He was there when humanity was stumbled towards their first journey into greatness. He was there to witness the rise and fall of many great nations, some of which had long passed before humanity even started to record their history, but he remembered them. He was there to witness their first journey as a race towards the stars, and he was there when they fell and returned to them in spirit.

He was there through it all, he helped them when he could. Even when the Game was active, he tried to help them. He led others believe he hid under a facade of bland indifference and self-servitude. Sometimes, he brought out the barest hint of who he was in the persona of a pale rider to confuse them even further. His goal then was to survive, and gave his trust to a certain extent as a means to an end. Cruel as it was to lie to his friends, especially to that damned Scotsman, it was necessary. It had been his nature long before he even rode with his supposed "brothers" as they had led a literal bloody swath across several continents for almost two millennia.

His primal urge to survive sometimes left a bad taste in his mouth. Of all the things he had done, that period of his life was his only eternal regret. He'd been making up for it ever since. Still to this day, when humanity had already left the sands of time to become words that were only read in data-pads that lined the planetary library on what was then known as Rigel Six. Even Earth was a forgotten chapter in the cosmic winds that passed through space.

Through all that, he still remembered, and that was why he was back to where it had all began. And when it had started to end…

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It had all come down to just him and the Highlander, Duncan Bloody MacLeod. He had chased the insane Scot when he had cut through humanity for the murder of his immortal son by the remaining band of humans who had tried to stave their race's demise by studying the hybrid human/immortal man. They nearly succeeded, but in their meager attempts to learn what they could of the immortal hybrid's quickening left the human part of the hybrid unstable. The very power that kept the immortals alive also kept Duncan's son from the passage of time ceased for an instant, and in that instant, his son crumbled into dust and smoke due to extreme old age.

Of the quickening itself, they kept it and tried to reproduce it. Duncan made short work of that when he killed all of them and absorbed his son's quickening. But since part of it was part of the so-called Source, being out of touch with it for so long drove the ancient Scotsman even more insane with battle-lust. The only other immortal that remained knew that the Highlander had to be stopped at all cost. There was no second, or better yet, third chance to recover from another dark quickening. Earth was already a dried up ball by then and the very pool that he had used to help cure Mac of his dark quickening was long gone.

He raised his sword once more, for the first time since they had stood side by side with each other as the last of their kind in helping guide humanity to a better future, now, it would also mark the time it would end. The battle was a long, dragged-out affair for their power was such that it almost literally tore the planet they were on to pieces. With one lucky hit from his ancient Ivanhoe, he had disarmed his brother.

Sanity suddenly returned for a brief instant to the maddened Scotsman's countenance as he gazed into his brother's eyes, the plea there more palpable than mere words.

"There can only be ONE." Duncan implored, there was nothing more for him to live for, and they both knew it.

"NO!" His brother screamed, his sword held high, uncertainty warred within him. "I don't want this. Please don't make me do this, Duncan."

"It's time, I can feel it." Duncan replied. "I may have gotten the Source, but it's always been you that helped me take it. I just now realized I'm just holding it till it was ready, ready for you. The gathering has been over long ago, now its time for it to be truly over. Just promise me one thing before I go."

"No." The other man repeated; his voice barely above a whisper as he listened.

"When this is over..." Duncan said, the madness slowly came back into his eyes. "Promise me you'll take me home."

With the last remains of his sanity, the ancient Highlander reached into his tattered clothes and pulled out a pill-sized plasma grenade. He broke the pill between his teeth with a savage bite and swallowed it. It never had time to reach the back of his throat before it blew his head off and threw the other man twenty yards out with the force of the explosion. Higher up, if anyone were still alive and to watch from orbit, the planet shook with unrivaled violence as the largest unwatched quickening tore whatever was living and not at all immortal on the planet to shreds.

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Maybe a few hundred years Earth-relative had passed again for him when a scoutship from a remote star system had found his perfectly preserved corpse floating amongst the planetary debris that had once been a world teeming with life; however scant that life was. They were even more surprised that he came back to life after they dragged his naked hide into an airlock.

When they arrived on their homeworld, he did his best to learn their language long enough to claim asylum as the only last living member of race known as "humans" that came from a planet called Earth. After some time had passed, he approached the leaders of his newfound friends and requested for the use of a ship - to see if he could still go home. It took some time, but they relented and wished him good journey. After a teary farewell, from an entire civilization no less, he was alone once more.

He used the logs given to him from the ship and crew that had originally found him to trace back their route to where they retrieved him. With a little luck, he found himself back amongst the debris of the destroyed world. He searched long and hard for Duncan's corpse. It took some doing, but he had finally found the frozen headless remains lodged within one of the larger floating islands that threatened to drift outwards into deep space that had wandered too far from the gravitational anomaly that had torn the world asunder. So powerful were they as the last immortals; that even a small residue of whatever was left of the quickening that remained with its former host was able to stop the body from decaying. He tractor-beamed the preserved body, and encased it in resin for the long trip home.

Immortal in life, as well as in death…

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A mild chirp from the forward console brought him back from his reminisce. To his surprise, the ship also picked up a gravity well that was still there, however faint, with no logical reason as to why it was so. The hair at the base of his neck pricked up, a feeling he thought he would never sense again with the death of his friend. It was calling to him.

He steered the ship forwards, to the epicenter of where he thought it would be. And there it was, he felt it before he saw it. Dead center of the gravitational maelstrom that should not be, was a large piece of planetary debris, crackling with energy that was all too familiar. He'd seen it only once when he watched Duncan fight the guardian, it was a sight he would never forget.

"My God." He gasped as he stared at it in awe. It was the Source. He may have absorbed all the quickening his brother had kept within him, but the Source stood apart from all of that, it was indeed a sentient thing. It had the patience to wait for him while it called to him across the stars.

Like a thing alive, the Source spotted the ship that carried its intended host within. With but a thought, it retracted its anchors on the piece of debris and rocketed towards the ship like the quickening it was.

The man could only stare in horror as it breached the shields and bathed the craft in an unholy light. To his eternal shock, none of the destruction that usually followed a quickening occurred. It swept over the craft and into him, wrapped him in a cocoon of light that was pure bliss. It was like magic.

"My friend." Voices from the past spoke to him as one. "We are one of many, and many of one. From you we come from, and to you we return. Forever, we are ONE. And with us, a new journey shall begin anew."

Two figures detached themselves from the light enraptured man.

"Duncan!" He gasped as he recognized the Highlander, he gasped again when he turned to the other one by his side. "Connor!"

Both former Immortals placed a hand on each side of the man's shoulders.

"Aye." Connor said with a smile. "Take us home, old man."

"I promise." He said.

"Da..." Duncan said, looking like he once did back on Earth in simpler times. "Thank you."

Then the light exploded all around him as the last of the Source's quickening filled him. And as it did, he remembered EVERYTHING. He wasn't just the oldest immortal, HE was the FIRST. To create his children, he had split himself from the main part of who he was; the Source. With the Source, he could use it to create life. From there, the race that called itself Immortals were born. The Source had also gained a rudimentary sort of intelligence as time progressed, and within it, the need to be whole again. So it's primal call came out, and thus the game began.

Of the man, when he started to become incomplete, he did not know that he would also lose most of his memories as more of him split. Now amongst the humans, he kept only hints and glimpses of what may and may not be. When he had taken a quickening by accident in self-preservation part of his mental faculties returned and he started to live as one of his own get, lost to the corridors of the history he made.

History gave him a name: Methos.

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When he finally awoke, he saw that the surrounding space before him was now bereft of a debris field. With the Source now gone, the gravitational field that held them dispersed. Each of the pieces that had once been part of a world flew off in different directions across the universe.

He looked down at himself and saw that the Source had changed him yet again, for he was glowing. He willed the light around him to fade as his gaze fell upon the resin that contained his brother… nay, one his son's son.

"I promise." He whispered. "I'll take you home."

Once he was fully complete, he used his re-awakened powers to return the ship back to his friends with a note of thanks and that he was well. That he had found what he was searching for…

He released his full quickening that turned into pure energy. He wrapped his ethereal form around the resin-like coffin and carried it with him as he flew across the stars.

He was going home.

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Time passed again, and here he was now. Back to where it all began.

The Solar system had seen better days.

Now it was dying as well, its yellow sun already felt cooler to his cosmic touch when he arrived. It won't be long till it died. It wasn't hard to use his newly returned powers to find the area where his son wanted to be laid to rest. Once done, he held himself in silence as the thin atmosphere howled around him in some sort of elemental eulogy.

For no reason, he started to laugh. He knew what he had to do; he could begin anew. He could use the Source within him to visit them again in every reality he could think of. After all, he was indeed one of many, and many of one. With that in mind, he tore a hole through space and time.

He should have paid better attention to his surroundings, in his haste to be with his children in any shape, or form, he ignored a part of him that warned him that Sol had suddenly gone nova.

It sent him everywhere and everywhen…

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Somewhere else, dimension X49851533258….

"No!" A female voice cried out in fear. "Please, not Harry!"

Lily Potter's soul cried out for help one last time before a flash of green light hit her and all was still except the crying of a child.

That same light flashed out again and rebounded off of a shield that had suddenly snapped into place around the child at the last instant, but not before a scant beam grazed the baby's forehead.

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Methos was, for the lack of a better word, confused. Something had happened at the last moment he had breached the dimensional divide, but he couldn't put a finger on it. The only thing he knew now was that he was stuck with nowhere to go. He was still coming to terms with being a so-called reawakened god that he had forgotten just what he could do. Time had no meaning for him, so he metaphorically "sat" in nothingness to think until he felt a tug that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.

It took him a microsecond to realize that it was a desperate prayer for help. Wondering just how he knew what it was, his curiosity got the better of him as he answered it.

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A flash of white light this time, and a strange sort of lightning-like energy began to form around the child as it studied the green light that it had caught, then sent it back to its owner with interest and blasted the pitiful excuse of a human into spectral dust.

It turned to the child and studied him as well. And found, to its horror, that even though the cut on the forehead was small, the blood that oozed out from it was blacker than the night. The child was dying. Whatever the human female tried to do, her sacrifice was for naught. Her prayer for help came far too late.

Lightning ran over the bleeding infant as it made a decision, not knowing what would happen, it dove into the child's body and merged with him.

It didn't expect what happened next as the floodgates between past, present, future, elsewhere and elsewhen lay open before them…

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Years later:

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Harry ran, his mind awhirl in fear as Dudley took to Harry hunting while they were still in school. He could hear them gaining on him, he turned around a corner and looked every which way for a hiding place. Frantic at finding no such refuge, he closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable beating that was sure to follow whilst wishing to be anywhere else but where he was now.

A slight tingling a few moments later caused him to open his eyes and he looked around in shock. He had somehow appeared on the roof of his school. Not one to believe what his senses told him, he nudged himself towards the edge of the roof and looked down.

He was indeed five stories up from where he had originally stood, and saw Dudley with his gang come from the corner to stop and look around in confusion. Harry scrambled back to the near-center of the roof and shook with relief.

Then it hit him.

He closed his eyes as a vision of stars filled him. In his mind, he saw vistas of strange lands, some of which he recognized from what little TV he managed to watch. Confusion set in as everything he saw looked as if the places looked new. He saw the great pyramids of Giza as they stood tall and proud, none of the weathering that adorned it was present. He saw what looked liked Rome would have looked like in its heydays.

He saw four people riding across the sands, with himself, riding a pale stallion.

Then the visions shifted, going faster through different periods in time until he saw an older version of himself as he sat on a desk of what looked like a classroom. But what kind of classroom was made of stone? Harry turned towards the voice that seemed to demand his attention and got the shock of his life when he saw a long, greasy-haired man in what looked like bathrobes scowl at him as he said "Ten points from Griffyndor for inattentiveness, Mr. Potter.".

The strange greasy-haired man's eyes seemed to linger on him and stared into his eyes. Harry felt like something was digging into his brain and he screamed as a flash of lightning blinded them both.

Harry shook himself awake as he opened his eyes. He was still at the roof, he searched for the cheap plastic wristwatch on his left arm underneath the overly large clothes he wore and saw that only a few minutes had passed for what seemed like an entire lifetime. The young man would have pondered more on what was happening to him, but chose to dismiss it, he'd really rather not be late as recess was almost over. He exited through the roof entrance and hurried to his classroom, all the while, oblivious to the slight scorch marks on the roof where he had arrived.

If he had noticed it and stayed to examine it, he would have been very surprised to see small arcs of lighting play over it before it vanished and took the scorch marks with it.

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TBC?

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AN: Story will cross with Hghlander only at the beginning. This will be completely AU onwards with the only connection to Highlander being Methos. I am also unsure if I plan to update this often as I already have more vested interest to finish two of my other stories. In any case, this is an experiment to see if I can screw around the HP events and timeline by adding the proverbial wild-card amongst the Immortal crowd. As some of you who've seen Highlander: The Source -- it was a love-hate kind of movie... there were so many things about it that rubbed me te wrong way and some that I liked. With this story, I made the focus on Methos and him as the actual Source in the end -- the reasoning will be explained later if I decide to write this full-time. In any case, I already have the "primer" for how I want this story to go.... but we'll see. I'm more technology/technomancy inclined and this is my own personal challenge to see if i can write a pure fantasy story with a very mild hint of sci-fi (unlike my main stories). I hope you like it and maybe want more....


	2. Chapter 2

the Harry Potter experiment

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Started: 1-16-09

Finished: ????

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Disclaimers: I do not own HP or anything else other than the story's concept and direction.

Summary: When all things end, they begin once again. In another universe where the curse that had just took his parents hit Harry, it opened the floodgates to a past of who he might have had always been, and shall always be.

A/N: For the sake of my story, I changed the timelines for certain events in my story and this chapter has one of them. I made Harry a few years younger when he had that incident at the zoo.

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The "energy" that had lain dormant within young Harry Potter woke for the first time the moment the child's latent magical energy tried to whisk him to another location. As it was unable to do so, the being that had once been Methos gave the child's magical energy a boost in big way and teleported the young man almost 80 degrees straight up onto the roof of his school.

It had been a while since that fateful night where they both merged. The "old man" figured to lay low behind the child's innermost psyche until Harry would be able to assimilate the explanation Methos would give and "freak out" as it were. That's not to say that Methos did not waste what free time doing nothing. In those times when the child was asleep, the former Immortal let his mind wander and touched the world he had now tied himself to. There were absolutely no Immortals of his kind in this reality. At least, not if you count the child he had saved. By merging with him, he had turned Harry into something equivalent to a pre-immortal, and a strange one at that. Harry would be the first and only pre this world will ever know because he was not "born" as one, but sired as one instead. He didn't need to die either to activate it, once the young man reached a certain point in his prime, he would simply stop aging. Dying from an accidental death if he wasn't careful, however, will simply force his immortality to activate early. Bad news though, Methos found something else that laid dormant within the child until it awakened on that day, it was an energy that was almost familiar and close to his own.

After careful study, he realized that it was almost the same feeling of energy as the one within the lunatic that had tried to kill the boy. Harry would also be able to develop similar abilities that his would-be murderer had once he started growing up, and that would be all if the wound wasn't as grave as it was for him to interfere. Now though, you could add the abilities the former Immortal had, that Harry no doubt also inherited due to their merging. All in all, the young man would become a force to be reckoned with when he got older.

Curious about the world he now found himself in and how this was possible; he extended his senses to try to encompass the whole planet and found that a small percentage of humans had that same unidentified energy within them. To his surprise, he also sensed a whole slew of non-humans that gave off their own energy signatures. He shook his metaphorical head, this world held many secrets, it just so happened that he and the young man he merged with had more than enough time later on to explore them. As it was, the merging was not yet complete, he had to wait until Harry matured some more and then they would become one person – at least in theory, he'd never done something like this before as far as he could remember. A part of him looked forward to it, for change was always welcome, the other part was a little afraid.

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The years passed slowly for Harry, but he never forgot that day. Ever since that time, he noticed something odd every now and then that he couldn't explain. There were times Dudley and his gang caught him and pounded the living daylights out of him. A few of those beatings were even enough to warrant broken bones, but they would almost heal the next day and the scars would vanish along with it. He never got sick either, as thin and as pale as he was, he should have at gotten sick at least once. None of that happened. The only evidence of any of the beatings that he had suffered were signs of phantom pains on most of the grievously affected area.

One thing odd about the beatings however, was the fact that his body seemed to try to roll with the punches and kicks done on his person. It was as if some part of him was trying to redistribute the pain in ways to make it bearable. Though his twisting and turning in his struggles could be interpreted as a desperate act to get free, no one noticed that the blows that rained on him ever got close to his vital areas, and those that did manage to graze anything of importance, were not critical enough to cause permanent damage.

Something strange happened though, one time, the Harry hunters had gotten the drop on him again. Through no fault of his own, he had slipped on a wet patch of ground behind the park on his way home and he had lost consciousness. The last thing he saw before he blacked out were the approaching feet of the boys who had chased him, but when he woke up later, they were gone. Furthermore, they hadn't touched him. Not one bruise marred him, not even a phantom pain.

They had simply left him alone.

Harry sat on the ground, dumbfounded at the impossible realization that he hadn't been hurt. It took him a few more minutes to have enough sense of mind to stand up and head home, still dazed at his strange fortune, and again did not notice the ground where he laid just a few moments before.

Small arcs of electricity played over the puddle he slid on and evaporated the water till there was nothing left.

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The ancient Immortal seethed within the confines of the child's inner psyche. He had known those brats would go too far someday, he just wasn't expecting it to be today. It was pure blind chance Harry cut through one of the places that was still slightly slick enough from yesterday's rain for him to act.

Once the boy was out cold, it was a simple matter of turning the moisture of the surrounding area into a form of condensed steam to create a partial manifestation of corporeality. He appeared in front of the bullies in all his ghostly Horseman glory and scared them shitless when he quoted a line from "Monty Python".

For children who were in varying degrees of girth, especially Harry's fat lard of a cousin, He was immensely amused to watch them nearly break the sound barrier in their attempts to run away from him as fast as they could. Uneducated children these days, he harrumphed, no love for the classics.

He peered down at his host and smiled. Harry was such a pure soul in contrast to who Methos was, even more so than the idiot Highlander had been. One could only hope that the child would never lose that sense of innocence when he grew older, what with the nasty things life usually threw their way. Because heaven help them should Harry also inherit the Horseman's personality once they finally merge as one being, he knew no one would survive the outcome should they piss him off long enough. In fact, the Dursleys would probably be the first ones to go, no question about it. He may have been a murderous bastard of biblical proportions in the past, but he still had a sense of right and wrong, even if a huge part of that was missing during that phase of his life. He was a killer who simply killed; never in his time as a Horseman had he abused a child the way Harry's relatives did. Kronos would probably have done it for the entertainment value, but never Methos.

He checked to make sure none of the buffoons lingered before he drew himself back into Harry's mind with great reluctance. It felt good being out for once, too bad the child was still too young to drink or he would have made an outing and emptied a local pub of all of its alcoholic wares.

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Time passed once more for Harry as the day-to-day routine of being hurt, fixed, and sometimes, receiving unknown help from a stressed-out Methos who kept a very tight reign on himself from fully manifesting a corporeal form just to rip the Dursleys into so many pieces that even a jigsaw puzzle addict would be too frustrated to put back together.

It was an exercise in patience on them both.

As it was, between the never-ending hassles Harry's relatives presented, the consciousness that was still Methos spent most of his free time outside of keeping an eye on him to study and incorporate the unknown energy the boy had within to his essence so the merging won't be as painful as it would be had Harry been a normal human.

The routine was broken one day when they dragged Harry to spend the day with his cousin at the zoo for Dudley's birthday outing. Mrs. Figg wasn't able to baby-sit Harry that day so the Dursleys were forced to bring him along. Everything had been going along normally until they went into the reptile section.

Dudley saw one of the bigger snakes on the floor to ceiling display that was near the glass and began to rap on the window. Right below said window was the sign: "Do Not Knock On The Glass".

"Come on!" Dudley yelled through the glass. "Do something!"

After the child exhausted himself from pounding on the tempered glass, Dudley leaned against the glass and wheezed. "This is boring." He said.

To Harry, the snake looked miserable, he unconsciously commiserated with the reptile out loud and got a direct reply via Spanish-accented snake hiss in shock. Unfortunately, Dudley noticed that the snake's attention was on Harry as it bobbed its head in a conversational-like manner.

"Hey, it's doing something!" Dudley cried out in delight and renewed his pounding on the glass while he rudely shoved Harry out of the way to get the snake's attention to focus on him.

Methos couldn't do a thing as the strange energy he had noticed inside the boy flared in automatic response at the "attack" and both host and spirit stared as the glass that divided man from beast vanished. It was a minor miracle that the fat fool didn't do a swan dive into the now open reptile habitat. The boy threw his arms about and flailed like a beached whale, and it wasn't doing any wonders for him either. The boy's parents frantically tried to haul their son away from the exposed habitat.

The large snake sniffed the air with its tongue and eased itself out of its former enclosure. It ambled close to Harry, hissed its thanks and slithered to freedom, heedless of the chaos it left in its wake when everyone scrambled to get away from its path.

Methos and his host just stared in stupefaction, both at a loss for mental and literal words. After the incident, the two had, of one mind, come to one single question: What the bloody hell is going on here? Methos was more determined than ever to get to the bottom of the child's inner energy. The more he thought about it, it reminded him of the same feeling he sensed from an old man he knew a long time ago: Ambrosius Embreis. Though the old coot told him then that he used a different name at the time when they met when he took Methos to be his last apprentice.

The former immortal snapped out of his reminisce in surprise. Once that information clicked, everything fell into place. The lost god felt like slapping himself several times in the face for not looking at the obvious. The child's inner energy was MAGIC. Albeit it was a different resonance of the energy from his reality, he should have known it for what it was. The child he had merged with will grow up to be a mage in the future.

The question now was; what type of magic do his kind practice? Was it the same as Ambrosius's? More importantly, just how powerful will they become now that a deified immortal had unwittingly merged with the boy's own spirit once the child's time as a human ends? For human is still what Harry is in blood until he fully matures naturally or the change to immortality is forced by an accidental death. Lost god though he was, Methos was not omnipotent, but he knew that once a pre-immortal stops being mortal, their blood undergoes a drastic, but subtle metamorphosis. They can be universal donors for humans, yes, but after their blood leaves their body and latches itself to another via transfusion, the blood taken takes the healthier characteristics of the transfused once it had finished healing them. That is to say, like a fingerprint, once it becomes part of a normal human's system, it no longer shares the resemblance of the original immortal host. That was one reason why a complete transfusion does not make a normal human take on immortal characteristics, or even become immortal for that matter. The immortal's quickening was more spiritual in nature than biochemical, you had to be "born" one to become one, or in this case, sired by a completely whole Methos himself as the Source.

The lost god also knew that the time for his self-enforced silence was almost over. Now that he realized that the strange unknown energy was actually the boy's magical core, he knew that the time had come to make himself known to Harry. The boy had to be trained, fast, if only to make sure that he wouldn't become a danger to himself and to others. If the mage was powerful enough to do magic just on survival instincts alone even at young age then the mage must be trained to harness it as early as possible or the something dire would happen if he was left unchecked and his or her baser emotions took hold of them in the long run.

"This is going to be fun." He thought sarcastically. It had been a very long time since he had practiced Magic, and even with his knowledge, he had never taken an apprentice. The magic that had graced his world had retreated into mists once Ambrosius died, and so he never bothered looking for one.

Tonight, Methos decided. Once the child was asleep, he would enter his dream and begin the training inside their combined mindscape.

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It had been a very taxing day for Harry; the Dursleys had managed to escape the notice of the bedlam that was the Reptile Exhibit in the zoo and drove them home as fast as their car could take them. Once home, he endured the longer than normal punishments and was rudely shoved into his cupboard without as much as a single bite of dinner.

Harry couldn't care less, however. He did not feel hungry at all as his mind tried to process what had happened. As far as he knew, snakes shouldn't talk. There was also the fact that throughout the punishments he received today did not even sting one bit. Sure, he felt them land, but the blows felt as if they were simply light taps rather than the usual amount of pain he normally took in.

Maybe he really was a freak.

Harry didn't realize that Methos was having a hell of a time trying to work with the kid's own recently-emerged powers that seemed to stay "on" permanently ever since that incident when he teleported. Before all this, when the child was younger, it was only the quickening that took care of all of Harry's physical abuse. Somehow, it all changed once Harry's magical core "woke" up and was able to wrap itself around the young teen's body and covered it with an invisible net of mystic steel. The pain he suffered at these occasions always seem as if it came muted when they landed, the "net" literally covered every inch of Harry's frame from any serious life-threatening assaults. Those that did manage to get through that first line of defense ran into the young man's quickening that dealt it a final blow.

Harry was never fully aware of all this though. He simply just chalked them up as a strange set of coincidences whenever they happened, but now though, he was starting to wonder why him. Confused, the young man settled in to sleep as comfortably as he could inside his cupboard room.

It wasn't long before Harry fell asleep and started to dream.

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He was back in the strangely familiar house. The whole place was lit in a muted green haze. He felt as if his movements were leaden as each step throughout the odd house felt like he was wading through water. The temperature dropped considerably as he closed in on the one room his dream always had a fixation on. He reached out a small hand to open the door.

Unlike the previous times where a flash of bright green light and the scream that usually woke him up in the wee hours of the morning occurred, but none of those things happened as the door in his dream opened. He stared as he was finally able to look inside the room for the first time since the dreams began when he was old enough to remember.

Within what looked like an old-fashion nursery stood a man who looked to bear a passing resemblance to him but with long hair and sported an electric blue paint that adorned one side of his face. His clothes were also strange as it was an off-color white, a sword of some sort hung down his left side as he stared back at Harry. The boy searched the man's face and noticed that he also had electric-blue eyes that matched the paint on the other half of his face somewhat. A small smile graced his lips when he finally spoke.

"Hello Harry." The man said, making a show of looking around the room. "I believe its time we talked, and about this little dream you have while we're at it too."

"Who are you, sir?" Harry asked as politely as he could, strangely at ease in front of someone who looked even more intimidating than his relatives could ever be.

"I'll give you a very long and detailed answer sometime in the future when you're ready." The man answered. "But the short answer is that, in essence, I'm you. My name is Methos."

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TBC?

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AN 2: Yes, Methos is quite possibly THE most powerful being in the HP world right now, bad thing about it is, the old man himself does not know this and neither will he remember everything even after he and the Source merged back together, especially since they now live within Harry. Both of them, once merged, will still not know their full potential. That's not to say that all of Methos's memories will up and disappear once they become one person -- that part of it was already gone when I made him split himself to create the race known as "Immortals" in his universe when I made the first chapter. This is kind of a Super Harry fic -- but with a Methos mentality, so he will be slightly Gray-ish to dark as a reflection of how one should not mess with a former Horseman when they really get pissed enough to want to blow the world to smithereens. As I write this, I have a vague idea where this fic is going, and I hope to butcher the original HP timeline with the life experiences and skills/abilities of a man who had become a "lost god". I hope you like it and maybe want more....


	3. Chapter 3

The Harry Potter experiment

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Disclaimers: I do not own HP or anything else other than the story's concept and direction.

Summary: When all things end, they begin once again. In another universe where the curse that had just took his parents hit Harry, it opened the floodgates to a past of who he might have had always been, and shall always be.

A/N: For the sake of my story, I changed the timelines for certain events in this story and this chapter has one of them. I made Harry a few years younger when he had that incident at the zoo.

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-For The Sake of Who I Am-

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Their talk started on the broad strokes of who they were to each other and from most things that Methos thought a child could handle without getting too technical. The subjects ranged from what Methos was and what exactly was going on with Harry Potter.

To say that young man was surprised was an understatement.

"Wait." Harry interrupted Methos in his re-telling of his universe's version of Camelot. "How is it that I am able to NOT freak out from of all this?"

"It's the dream world, Harry." Methos explained as he gestured all around him, actively willing it to change scenery. "Here is where the words 'seeing, feeling, and believing' becomes rather loose and subjective. A small subconscious part of your human psyche realizes that you're still asleep in the waking world and thus can take things in stride in this one. That's how some people seem to accept that they can do the impossible here. For us, it becomes a matter of fact that we can do anything here. And that's a good thing."

"Why is that?" Harry asked.

"I have a lot to teach you and not a whole lot of time to do so in the waking world where I'm usually on guard from your relatives and their devil-spawn of a son." The man answered. "Here, time can hold no meaning should we wish it."

"What exactly will I be learning, sir? I'm only eight years old." Harry asked again, at a loss in the face of the vast ocean of knowledge that seemed to swirl around Methos.

"Well, magic will be one of them." The lost god answered. "Though I do not know exactly how your world's magic works. I have no way to read some of your world's magical texts while we're caged in this house. The raw energy of your power however, is close enough for a match for me to teach you my world's equivalent of the mystic arts as taught to me by Abrosius Embreis."

"Who is he?" Harry asked.

"He was my teacher for all intents and purposes. I was his second student after he tried to make up for his mistake when he didn't realize his first student was self-absorbed, power-mad bitch. Said student was also under the guise of his lover at the time too. Nimue was her name, taken after the real nymph Nimue whose body she controlled." Methos said as he reminisced on how they first met. "Ambrose was not the same kind of immortal my children were, the powers he learned to wield made him just as long lived as one in the long run. He changed his name several times over the centuries, frequently too, while he actively pursued a dream of a nation filled with equals. Old coot went to ground after one of his more ambitious attempts blew up in his face and started to work behind the scenes instead of the forefront."

"Wow!" Harry said in awe.

"Yeah." Methos thought aloud as shook his head when he remembered that the idiot-savant wizard shaved off his beard and dyed his hair after the debacle. Frustrated with the whole mess, he locked himself in a cave for a few hundred years until anyone who knew him had long since passed. "I even helped him for a bit on that one until Arthur got so bloody wasted that he accidentally slept with his half-sister and got her knocked up with a bastard son. The bitch had named their illegitimate son, Mordred. I dunno what kind of drink he got served with that night, but just about everything went downhill after that."

Harry gawked. The legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were one of the few books he read when he had discovered that hiding in a library kept him marginally safe from Dudley and his gang. It gave him hope that the "normal" stuff his relatives did to him was not the norm.

"Arthur? King Arthur? He was real in your world? And your teacher was actually Merlin?" Harry asked with barely repressed glee.

"Yep, it seemed the legend played itself out here too, albeit differently. Since we're both one being, what you read, I read too." Methos confirmed to himself. "Merlin was the name Ambrose went by that time, but after the fall of Camelot, he went so far as to dissociate himself from his own name when his former apprentice, Arthur's step-sister, used their bastard son in her bid to wrest Camelot's throne. It was a right sorry mess, I tell you, it was hard on all of us to see a dream so shattered."

"Who were you that time?" Harry had to ask, amused and enthralled at the picture the "old man" painted.

"I went as the one person most people least expected me to go as. I went as someone I would rather not be caught dead as if I could help it." Methos roared in laughter as he struck a pose. "I became the best of the best, a flower of chivalry. A man so noble, that people would not even think twice to associate him as me in a sentence. I swear if I had been fully mortal, I would have given myself diabetes ten thousand times over from the sugary drivel I spouted out loud back then. I out-boy scouted the boy scout Highlander in so many ways it had have made him think twice to lecture me on morals. Hell, some of the lines he spouted off on some of his morality tirades were mine and had been passed down from generation to generation!"

"You were Lancelot?!" Harry yelped in shock as he guessed, correctly, by the smirk on the lost deity's face. "Bloody hell."

"Watch your language kid." Methos admonished the child with a chuckle while Harry retorted with a stuck out tongue, and said something about pots and kettles. "In any case, I left that life behind me after seeing Guinevere off at the nunnery one last time. Oh, I know that look on your face, we only had ONE affair and everyone thinks we stabbed Art in the back. One, she wasn't married yet when we first met, and two, Art's marriage to Gwen was more about politics at first. I didn't even think she WAS that same Guinevere until I came to Camelot and Ambrose roped me into joining the Knights there while I trained under him in secret.

"It was a bit of a shock when I first saw her again." Methos continued. "I tried to stay away, but when have I ever listened to common sense? Gwen's feelings for me never changed, but I saw that she was also falling for Arthur as time passed. Who wouldn't love the man? Arthur's ideals at the time were radical, and if anyone had the balls to try to do it, it would have to be him. Were he Immortal, I would have gladly exposed myself just to train him. It was a bit of a letdown for all of us when things fell apart."

"When all was said and done...." Methos continued. "Gwen bade me to deliver her to a nunnery so she could spend the rest of her days in prayer and silent contemplation. She never recovered from losing Arthur and died less than ten years later. Poor Ambrose was the most affected, old coot went ballistic and rampaged after the ones responsible. It was a two-front showdown and the idiot dragged me along with him. He tried to kill Morgana on the first strike, but she pulled a fast one and actually morphed into Nimue. You could immagine our shock at that one."

"I think." Methos said. "That was the final straw on the proverbial camel's back for Ambrose. Not only did the damned witch ensnare Arthur... but he was the one she got to first to start it all. You see, he actually fell in love with her as Nimue and was heartbroken that she had used him. I helped land the killing blow by way of controlled quickening. The lightning bolt that hit her wasn't completely mystical in origin at all, so she never expected that kind of attack. She hadn't even known I was immortal, now one did. During that time I had already mastered my own quickening enough to make it appear as if I had none."

"Wow." Harry said again. "What happened to Nimue once Morgana Le Fey died."

"She was too far gone." Methos answered. "Once Le Fey was out of her system, the magic that the dark witch had used to snare the nymph started to eat her from inside out, they essentially were one and the same now as Le Fey usurped her body for her own. There was nothing Merlin or I could have done. Before she breathed her last, she told Merlin not to despair, for while Le Fey may have been in control of her that time, the nymph was somewhat aware of the time they had spent together - ensnared or not - the real Nimue saw the good Merlin did and where she free, she would have returned the love he truly deserved. When she was gone, we wrapped up Morgana's shell and burned it alongside her dead son."

"Afterward, the old coot handed me Caliburn when Princess Viviane - Fey of the Lake - got word to him and asked him to pass it on to me. Both said the damned thing was actually mine now that no one else was acceptable enough for the sword's standards to wield it. Funny thing about the damned sword, it changed shaped the moment it was in my hand and was barely recognizable as Arthur's blade." Methos said. "I drank myself into a stupor after that, then stripped one of my armors bare of any markings and painted the damned thing black. In it, I let my frustrations out on the remaining morons who brought about Camelot's downfall. I got myself a nasty rep against those types too afterwards. I kept the sword, placed a few charms over it and asked it to take the shape of an Ivanhoe so no one would recognize it. It stayed with me wherever I go, able to appear at my beck and call."

Harry stopped Methos for a moment and thought out loud. "What about Galahad? Since you were immortal that time, how come they said he was your son?"

"Oh." Methos sobered a bit in his mirth. "He was a foundling and a student of mine – died young too and got stuck as a perennial 17 year old teenager until his true death and was re-absorbed. He WAS one of my sons for real, now that I think about it, thanks to re-merging with the Source. You have to know though, as time passed, the Source began to develop an active will all on its own and kept splitting itself because it was the last act I ever did before I lost contact with it and became a semi-normal immortal like my children."

Suddenly, Methos changed topics. "Enough about me, even though time is relative in this place, the outside world still moves on its predetermined pace. I brought you here to train, and I'll do just that. The first thing you need above all else, is focus. With focus, you can control your magic to a point that will be as instinctive as breathing. The side effect of being able to do so would secure your thoughts and prevent intrusion. I don't know about you, but once humanity had ventured out of their galaxy, they encountered a few telepathic races that enter your thoughts automatically. Some of them are pure telepaths and don't even speak verbally at all but through mindspeak alone."

With that in mind, the lost god started teaching Harry the basics of centering oneself. From that moment forward, any nightmare the child experienced were simply collected as data to be studied, analyzed, and discussed between the two of them. With Methos as the proverbial "guard" until he can marshal his own mental defense, the child would no longer be afraid of dreams that had kept him awake and a screaming wreck since he could remember. The tutelage also developed a habit within him to look at any problem or situation from any angle possible, of course he wasn't as good as Methos yet, he didn't have close to an eon of life experiences to become a master at it for the foreseeable future. It was enough in the interim until they merged and became one being.

Little by little, the boy that was Harry Potter was growing up to be the man his parents meant him to be. And during that time, Methos planned for the Dursley's come-uppance for their treatment of the boy.

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A/N: Again, a short chapter for another story of mine -- but such is what I am capable of right now due to time constraints.... also, I intentionally changed the Arthurian legend into something of my own design..... is an AU of an Arthurian AU..... More will come as I find more free time to write. I just wanted to introduce something in the story that will have an impact later on....


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